Microsoft SDE Intern Interview Experience
💼 LTIMindtree Interview Experience (On-Campus) | Fresher | 2026
Salesforce SMTS | Interview Experience | Rejected
JPMC | SDE2 (Associate) - Java Backend - Interview Experience + Compensation
Microsoft - SDE2 - Coding Round
Publicis Sapient | L2 Plateform
Summary
I applied for an L2 Plateform role through a referral and underwent a two-hour technical interview. The round covered a broad range of topics including core Java, data structures, concurrency, distributed systems, databases, Spring Boot, API design, and security, along with a coding challenge and a design pattern identification question.
Full Experience
I've applied through referral in June 2025. Total rounds : 2 Technical and 1 Managarial
Technical Round 1: 2 hrs
- As a non-functional requirement, how would you secure the personal data of your user within your database?
- End-to-end testing approach
- abstract class and interface?
- Immutable class and deep copy and What are the trade-offs of immutability?
- serialization and serialVersionUID
- HashMap internal working
- equal & hash code contract
- What is the difference between fail fast and fail safe
- TREEMAP internal working?
- Coding: find the common elements (intersection) between two lists in Java
- What’s wrong with this code: A code where you’ve to find correct design pattern
- ThreadPool and types
- Callable vs Future
- Synchronised v/s ReentrantLock
- Pub-sub model?
- Kafka vs RabitMQ
- For distributed system which one is best - Kafka , SQS and RabitMQ
- Distributed systems: delivery guarantees types?
- Correlation ID
- Error handling in Kafka
- Full outer join
- JPA : n+1 problem
- How to improve performance for aggregate queries
- Types of indexes
- JVM: Memory management
- JVM parameters like XMS and XMS
- Garbage collector algorithms
- Profiling tools
- Try with resources.
- OpenAPI specification
- API Versioning
- Error handling,
- 401 vs 403 error
- Spring boot features
- Spring Reactive
- Synchronous and Asynchronous interaction
- Working of Circuit Breaker?
- Local transaction in microservices
- Saga pattern
- Server-side caching
- Caching strategies
- GraphQL
- Securing API
- Access token and the refresh token
- Spring security
- API Gateway, how to do it from the scratch
2nd round will be an onsite round
Interview Questions (46)
As a non-functional requirement, how would you secure the personal data of your user within your database?
Describe your approach to end-to-end testing.
Explain the differences between an abstract class and an interface.
Discuss immutable classes, deep copy, and the trade-offs associated with immutability.
Explain serialization and the purpose of serialVersionUID.
Explain the internal working mechanism of a HashMap.
Describe the contract between the equals() and hashCode() methods in Java.
What is the difference between fail-fast and fail-safe iterators?
Explain the internal working mechanism of a TreeMap.
Write code to find the common elements (intersection) between two lists in Java.
Given a piece of code, identify what's wrong with it and suggest the correct design pattern.
Explain ThreadPools and their different types.
Discuss the differences between Callable and Future in Java concurrency.
Compare and contrast the synchronized keyword with ReentrantLock.
Explain the Publish-Subscribe (Pub-Sub) model.
Compare Kafka and RabbitMQ.
For a distributed system, which messaging queue is best among Kafka, SQS, and RabbitMQ?
What are the different types of delivery guarantees in distributed systems?
Explain what a Correlation ID is and its use in distributed systems.
Describe strategies for error handling in Kafka.
Explain what a full outer join is in SQL.
Explain the N+1 problem in JPA and how to mitigate it.
How would you improve the performance of aggregate queries in a database?
Describe different types of database indexes.
Explain JVM memory management.
Explain JVM parameters like XMS and XMX.
Describe different garbage collector algorithms in the JVM.
What profiling tools are you familiar with and how do you use them?
Explain the 'try-with-resources' statement in Java.
What is the OpenAPI specification and how is it used?
Discuss different strategies for API versioning.
Discuss general strategies for API error handling.
Explain the difference between 401 Unauthorized and 403 Forbidden HTTP status codes.
Describe key features of Spring Boot.
Explain Spring Reactive and its principles.
Explain synchronous and asynchronous interaction in distributed systems.
Explain how a Circuit Breaker pattern works.
How are local transactions handled in a microservices architecture?
Explain the Saga pattern for distributed transactions.
Discuss server-side caching mechanisms.
Describe different caching strategies.
Explain what GraphQL is and its advantages.
Discuss general principles and methods for securing an API.
Explain the concepts of access tokens and refresh tokens in authentication.
Discuss the features and working of Spring Security.
How would you implement an API Gateway from scratch?